Short Film: Connected

Tag Line: The mystery that will change their fate.

Pre-Production

In the beginning of this project, we all wrote scripts for our own short story idea and presented them to the class. After getting into groups, we decided on whose story we would be filming and creating. My group was Katie, Tayah and Mason and we chose Katie's short film called Connected. Her film was about a brother (Jaxon) and sister (Alix) who were separated at birth and meet up at school. Upon seeing each other they experience a series of blackouts and strange dreams where they see each other inside a void. They consult each other and come to the conclusion that they might be brother and sister. The film ends with the two confronting Alix's aunt about their assumptions. She tells them that it is true but they were never supposed to meet each other. We drew up storyboards and rewrote parts of the script before beginning filming. Katie was our director since she knew the story best and had a vision for what she wanted it to look like, Tayah was the director of photography, I was art director and Mason was the editor. 

Production

After hiring all the actors, we met up over the weekend Katie's house to film the ending scenes where Alix and Jaxon come home and demand an explanation from her aunt. At school the next week we continued working backwards and got to work filming the scenes where they are researching dreams and blackouts in the library. We had to work around a few scheduling conflicts where the actors couldn't film but we got everything filmed on time. We also had to work around issues with broken equipment and used a Canon DSLR to film some scenes. Do do the scenes where Alix and Jaxon see each other in a void, we filmed in front of a green screen and Mason edited black all around them. To manage time the best, Mason worked with the clips we had already filmed and editing them together while we went out and filmed what was left. A struggle we had was moving the camera around to film different shots from a variety of different angles. Sometimes this made a scenes take a long time to film.

Post Production

We got a little behind in editing because of the order we filmed the story in. Looking back, we should have filmed the green screen room scenes first because those take the longest to edit. Overall however, everything went very smoothly in this project. The things that we learned from previous projects and applied to this one helped us to be successful here. I will remember our strengths from this project and apply them to my remaining work this year and other assignments next year.